‘No,’ says Vesta, firmly.
Chapter Thirteen
The Lover is a great reader. He loves to read. He lives in a world where not many people do, where his learning is an anomaly and treated, often, with suspicion, but without reading he wouldn’t be the man he is. He wouldn’t know about the forty days, or about ritual and how its basis often lies in accidental coincidence and pragmatic use of the surroundings in which it developed. And besides: reading helps stave off the loneliness, in more ways than one.
The things he has read about Ancient Egypt, for instance, and its burial traditions. While venerating the corpses of the great is common all over the world, the means of disposing of them often reflects the circumstances of their lives. Thus the Vikings, facing solid, deep-frozen soil for much of the year, would, unsurprisingly, dispose of their heroes in fire and water. And a country in which the combination of climate and shallow topsoil would frequently turn up desiccated corpses from shallow burials might well eventually ritualise the natural order. Egypt’s arid plains, dotted with salty lakes that threw up great heaps of sodium, was ideal for experimentation. With skilled evisceration, and the right combinations of salts and herbs, forty days would be the perfect time to turn wet and putrefying dead bodies into leathery facsimiles that, at least passingly, resembled the original owner as they were in life.
But in a south London suburb – even a suburb that is going through the longest heatwave in living memory – the process needs a little help.
He’s learned as he’s gone along. Practice, after all, makes perfect, and besides, he’s had to learn two sets of skills where his teachers only had to master one. In Egypt, two sets of priests were responsible for rendering their royalty fit for the afterlife: the parichistes and the taricheutes, the cutters and the salters. Necessity has forced the Lover to master both roles, and there were bound to be errors along the way.
He doesn’t like to think about his first two attempts at making himself a girlfriend; is just grateful that he didn’t live in this crowded house when the first experiment failed, at least. A body is easier to move before the rot has set in. Jecca left the house in a series of carrier bags, flesh falling from bone like a five-hour pot roast; but at least, coming from a garden flat, she didn’t have to go through any communal areas. Katrina, her body cavities cleared more studiously, was a steep learning curve. His incision, down the front of the abdomen the way a pathologist would do it, left the trunk loose and floppy, and her nose was ruined by his clumsy attempts to remove the brain with the crochet hook. The parichistic entry, via a slit in the left-hand side, though it means having to plunge himself arm-deep in viscera, produces a neater, more human-shaped final product. He discovered the barrel drill in Homebase soon after that. He figures that the Egyptians would have used one too, had they had access to electricity and geared motors. He thinks of them sometimes, his two lost loves: Katrina sacrificed to fire and Jecca to water. He wonders if they are lonely, now, as he no longer is.
But he’s not happy with Alice. She’s an improvement on the two who came before, but it was only once her forty days were up and he had to break her from her crust like a salt-baked chicken that he understood that he needed to change the desiccation salts as the process progressed. The Egyptians had the help of the blazing sun to preserve their kings. For his princesses, he has dehumidifiers, and the close quarters of their confinement means that the juices have nowhere to go.
He moves Alice and Marianne to the sofa to watch the TV while he attends to Nikki. Some tender part of him wants to spare her the indignity of exposing her half-cooked nakedness to the gaze of his more finished beauties. As he carries Alice, he sees that her smile has spread again, as her skin is contracting back towards her hairline. He can almost see her wisdom teeth and is painfully aware of the bones beneath the surface. I haven’t done you justice, my dear, he thinks. I should have read more. If only I’d known before it was too late that a girl like you deserves her share of moisture once the natural wet is gone. He puts her gently down in the armchair, unwinds her arm from round his neck. She settles with a rustling whisper. Her hair is thin and brittle, her eyes sunken and hollow beneath their drooping lids. I wonder, he thinks. Soon you’ll be nothing but skin and bone, flaking and shedding over my carpet. Perhaps it’s time that we started to think about parting company.
He goes back to the bed, to his Princess Nikki.
The base of the bed is covered with a thick plastic sheet, liberated from a building site. Sleeping above his girls has never been a problem for him – indeed, it gives him a feeling of warm companionship – but the process of transformation, even with the alkaline, deadening effect of his home-made natron, tends to produce sudden bursts of smell that wake him, gagging, in the night. He props the mattress – lovely soft, lightweight memory-foam mattress – against the wall and peels the plastic off. Waits, breathing through his mouth, until his stomach settles, then tugs on the cloth ties and allows the lids to lift on the two compartments below. He spent a long time making his choice on the internet once he’d seen the possibility of such a bed, clicking through faux leather after faux leather, until he finally settled on this workmanlike black hessian covering. Cloth tends to soak up smells, but it’s breathable; and when the bed is empty and the plastic cover off, the memory of its former contents dissipates over time. He has drilled air holes where the walls meet, to allow the bank of dehumidifiers in the head section to do their work. The collection tank of each one – and there are six altogether – is nearing full. This was where he went wrong with Jecca and Katrina. You can never believe, until you experience it first-hand, how much moisture there is in a human body. It comes and comes, for the first few weeks. In week two, once the natron really starts to work its magic, he has to empty the chambers on a daily basis.
Two by two, he unclips the chambers and carries them to the kitchenette sink. The water is strangely greasy, as though it has been used to wash up with after a full Sunday roast. He doesn’t bother to flush around the sink. He’ll be chasing it down soon enough, after all. He grabs the bucket and the trowel from the cupboard under the sink, and returns to his darling.
The natron has settled, as it often does, and one shoulder peeks out from above the surface. This is one of the reasons that he’s opted for the weekly fuel change. He left Alice alone for the full forty days, and chipping and scraping her out from her hard-set casing was the full work of an afternoon, a chore that made him admire the stoical patience of archaeologists in a way he never had before. And he has been forced to dress her in sleeves since he got her out, to hide the deterioration of her exposed left arm. No little sundresses for Alice; no pretty evening gowns. Every time he looks at her, he feels sour and sad. So close, and yet so far.
‘Never mind,’ he says to Nikki. ‘I’ve got you, now.’
He digs from the walls inwards. The powder is still dryish in the corners away from the flesh. It pours like sand into the bucket, almost good enough to use again. But the Lover no longer believes in shortcuts. Precision, he knows, means the difference between failure and something to treasure for ever. He fills the bucket and takes it to the sink. His natron, made by mixing simple washing soda with equal parts of bicarb, has the added advantage of acting like a drain cleaner. Everything that goes down his sink – tea leaves, bacon fat, scraps of visceral matter scrubbed from his parichistic hands – is periodically dissolved and flushed away from the pipes as he changes his preservatives. He upends the bucket, turns on the cold tap and watches, pleased, as the natron fizzes, smokes and vanishes down the plughole.